That right there is the recipe for genuine innovation:
- Embrace uncertainty and the fact one doesn’t know the future.
- Understand that people are inventing things — and not just technologies, but also use cases — constantly.
- Remember that the art comes in editing after the invention, not before.
-- from https://stratechery.com/2023/attenuating-innovation-ai/
The core functions of the device form factor formerly known as the cellphone, whatever we want to call it — the pocket device — what would you say the core functions are five years out?
I don’t know.
The reason I don’t know is because I wouldn’t have thought that there would have been maps on it five years ago. But something comes along, gets really popular, people love it, get used to it, you want it on there. People are inventing things constantly and I think the art of it is balancing what’s on there and what’s not — it’s the editing function. -- Jobs
Link: https://stratechery.com/2023/attenuating-innovation-ai/
Compared to testing on production, testing locally means faster iterations although it's usually hard to conduct.
External dependencies bring risks.
Jamey Arent
The Zookeeper’s Wife
谦卑胜于自傲。
Polytopia Life Lessons
Empathy is not an asset. “He knows that I have an empathy gene, unlike him, and it has hurt me in business,” Kimbal says. “Polytopia taught me how he thinks when you remove empathy. When you’re playing a video game, there is no empathy, right?”
Play life like a game. “I have this feeling,” Zilis once told Musk, “that as a kid you were playing one of these strategy games and your mom unplugged it, and you just didn’t notice, and you kept playing life as if it were that game.”
Do not fear losing. “You will lose,” Musk says. “It will hurt the first fifty times. When you get used to losing, you will play each game with less emotion.” You will be more fearless, take more risks.
Be proactive. “I’m a little bit Canadian pacifist and reactive,” Zilis says. “My gameplay was a hundred percent reactive to what everyone else was doing, as opposed to thinking through my best strategy.” She realized that, like many women, this mirrored the way she behaved at work. Both Musk and Mark Juncosa told her that she could never win unless she took charge of setting the strategy.
Optimize every turn. In Polytopia, you get only thirty turns, so you need to optimize each one. “Like in Polytopia, you only get a set number of turns in life,” Musk says. “If we let a few of them slide, we will never get to Mars.”
Double down. “Elon plays the game by always pushing the edge of what’s possible,” Zilis says. “And he’s always doubling down and putting everything back in the game to grow and grow. And it’s just like he’s just done his whole life.”
Pick your battles. In Polytopia, you might find yourself surrounded by six or more tribes, all taking swipes at you. If you swipe back at all of them, you’re going to lose. Musk never fully mastered that lesson, and Zilis found herself coaching him on it. “Dude, like, everyone’s swiping at you right now, but if you swipe back at too many, you’ll run out of resources,” she told him. She called that approach “front minimization.” It was a lesson she also tried and failed to teach him about his behavior on Twitter.
Unplug at times. “I had to stop playing because it was destroying my marriage,” Kimbal says. Shivon Zilis also deleted Polytopia from her phone. So did Grimes. And, for a while, Musk did so as well. “I had to take Polytopia off my phone because it was taking up too many brain cycles,” he says. “I started dreaming about Polytopia.” But the lesson about unplugging was another one that Musk never mastered. After a few months, he put the game back onto his phone and was playing again.
— Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson